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Comment by iugtmkbdfil834 | Hacker News Reader

<< As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme.

It.. feels accurate. I don't frequent FB or other mainstream social spots, but even on HN, the pattern is relatively clear. Vocal minorities tend to drive the conversations to their respective corners, while the middle quietly moves to, at most, watch at a safe distance.

Part of me is happy about it. The sooner we get out of the social media landscape, the better the society as a whole will be.. in my opinion anyway. Still, we have already lost so much of the original internet. That loss makes me sad.

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The article uses the word "partisan", the opposite of which I think is "independent", not "centrist" or "middle", but to be fair the article seems to conflate the two as well and never uses the word "independent". However to me there is a big difference between being a centrist and being independent. One could be independent with views that are at times deemed extreme right and at times extreme left. Similarly, some people are "centrist" yet somehow deeply partisan in the sense that their party can do no wrong and everything is the fault of the other party.

This. Partisanship is going along party lines (agreeing with the Party) where independence is thinking of your own free will. We desperately need more of those people in charge.

Why would the party support them?

For the team? For the influence? There used to be a time when people could work across the aisle.

You can have beliefs, but you also must have heart and a brain to open your world view to other perspectives. This is what being an adult is all about. Not this crap that we see today.

I would suggest that at those times it's when the structure of achieving the same common goal was at stake.

Disagreements on the best day to provide services to the public are still attempting the same common objective.

Disagreements on which people will have their rights removed are not a "let's agree to disagree" sort of thing.

Those are the people who do the nost work for the party. People who 'toe the line' are also those who tend not to do the work that gets people elected. People who care enough to think also knock of doors and the other work that gets someone elected. You won't find a thinking person you 100% agree with, but a mostly agree is better than a mostly disagree - and by doing that work you also get to talk to people and perhaps change minds.

It is a valid question. I looked at the author's profile and while he is not from US ( Amsterdam ), his studies focus[1] appears to be on subjects that would suggest he should be relatively well acquainted with politics in US along with how they differ in terms of terminology from EU or UK. Sadly, I can't seem to say for sure how term was intended in the article itself. That said, the author does seem to reference individual US parties.

[1]https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/t/o/p.tornberg/k.p.tornberg.ht...

[removed]

Can you elaborate? Do you mean that the final version is not approved by the author/s for publication?

[removed as I don't wish to tank this guy's career. he knows what he's done though]

My point was a little more subtle. Does the human at the end of the process that presses 'submit'/'publish'/'do this thing' bear a responsibility for verbiage, claims and everything in the paper that bears his name regardless of whether or not he wrote it.

Your entire argument is a personal vibe.

Maybe your literacy is not as great as you think it is and unfamiliar written tones are difficult for you. The result is personal discomfort and it's easier to blame external reality rather than your own ignorance and inexperience.

I noticed that ZeroGPT has a high false positive rate. Put the same document in other checkers and it's says zero AI.

Insisting that truth is always in the middle is a radical ideology on itself.

The problem with this is that people are particularly bad at judging their own 'independence' of thought, regardless of their political views.

I would say the opposite of partisan would be someone who actively seeks to understand and relate to the views of those who they disagree with, or who are from their out-group. This would also imply independence of thought.

The problem with “the middle” is that’s relative to the Overton window. Federal troops assassinating kneeling protesters didn’t used to be “one side” with “the middle” suggesting they should simply arrest them and lock them up.

Right on cue

What is the point of your three words here? Legitimately I don't get it.

The parent comment was about how the most partisan users post the most on social media and sure enough, the first response was by a partisan user.

They have the most to win/lose.

The rest are just going ‘WTF is this shit?!?’

And you are replying to a partisan user.

Not sure why this is relevant.

The paper says partisanship is strongly correlated with frequency of posting. Are you also pointing out that the commenters here are very partisan and this shows the paper is correct?

It is relevant, reread it.

Best I can tell, you're indicating that more partisan users post more, as the paper found.

The problem is that "partisan" doesn't automatically mean "wrong".

People wield "the middle" as if it is some magic incantation that makes them correct or immune to criticism. In fact, it is generally the "middle" or, as I prefer to call them, the "inert" that tend to be wrong since they are always behind the curve rather than ahead of it.

In Milgram's experiment, only the most "partisan" refused to deliver the shocks. The "middle" dutifully continued right to the end and delivered the highest voltages even as their own distress mounted.

You may avoid politics, but politics may not avoid you.

I am ok with being called inert. In the context, this would suggest I am less easily swayed than most.

That just means you cling to your wrong ideas with the same tenacity as your correct ones.

Someone very famous who predates social media had words for you:

"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

... There are layers to your post that need to be properly disassembled to be properly appreciated. And I assure you that I do appreciate it. Deeply. ...

<< That just means you cling to your wrong ideas with the same tenacity as your correct ones.

It is bold of you to assume that your ideas are correct and, consequently, my ideas are not.

It is not just bold, but also kinda well, not smart, to assume what my ideas are. For all you know, I believe circles are, in fact, round. Are you going to argue against roundness of circles now?

But to top of it all off with a quotable quote that seems like it should mean something, and yet manages to mean nothing, because, apart from it being -- lets say -- misapplied in general, it is also ridiculously wrong in the context.

How does work for an outright rejection?

We can stop talking now. We have no useful thoughts to exchange.

There isn't exactly a "curve" to be behind, just as there isn't one single "history" that you can end up "on the wrong side of". Politics is just the constantly shifting borders in a formalised war for power between different groups, long term there is no single direction of "progress".

>You may avoid politics, but politics may not avoid you.

This is the correct view, in the sense that if you don't belong to some kind of tribe, you'll get ripped off by someone who does. The inert group are not wrong, but by participating less than the others in the battle for their collective self interest, they will end up being the ones taken advantage of.

Or, you know, they actually have a point, and framing them as just another partisan is an uncharitable response. Which, ironically, is typical of partisans.

Neither the paper nor the original comment said the most partisan commenters are wrong. It found a strong correlation between how partisan a social media user is and how often they post.

You're being uncharitable by assuming the commenter is disagreeing that with the point that the Overton window has moved. Which, I've heard, is typical of partisans.

(De)legitimation is the dominant meta. Much more than arguing on the merits of ideas, folks argue on the legitimate status of their opponents real or perceived stance. A lot of it attempts to play to the audience rather than either side open to changing their minds. That's how I read it at least.

>Federal troops assassinating kneeling protesters didn’t used to be “one side”

This is factually not true. Levels of violence by the state against citizens in the United States is at near historic lows. The state killed dozens of children in Waco in the 90s, bombed domestic buildings in Philadelphia in the 80s, shot protestors Kent State University in the 70s, going back to the early years of the USA where protests and rebellions were put down with private militias and bounties. The shooting by one officer of one protester in a scuffle with officers wouldn't have reached the history books in any other time.

US law enforcement kill over 1000 people every year, way more than any comparable country [1]. The raw data of incidents on Wikipedia has to be broken down by month [2]. And here's a chart showing the number has been going up basically every year for at least a decade [3].

What "historic lows" are you talking about?

[1]: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/policekillings_total.htm...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_killings_by_law_enfor...

[3]: https://www.consumershield.com/articles/how-many-people-are-...

OP is saying that this is a historical low for US, not in the grand scheme of things.

It is a major simplification to put the political spectrum on a single line (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum). If we put it as a triangle, the Overton window can be as far from left to right as left/right is to the middle.

The Overton window is not involved in defining the middle, and the middle definitively do not need to agree 50% with any specific decision done by the left or right.

I would usually keep quiet and ignore post like this because they are extreme timesinks, but to give a perfect example: Waco. It happened under the other side. The official story is bunk and half the country that is supposedly anti-authoritarian cheered it on.

I don't care to have the conversation or change anyone's mind but your post is the perfect example why people in the middle disengaged from the loud minority that takes over online spaces.

I'm old enough to remember Waco and there was widespread criticism of Janet Reno's handling of Waco. This idea that the Dems "cheered it on" is ahistorical post facto justification for a position you likely already held.

I see this all the time. It's some combination of "X was hypocrditical" or "X was mean to me", which leads to "and that's why I support [the opposite of X] as [a centrist, a moderate, someone with common sense]". And reaching for a ~30 year old siege is the reachiest of reaches.

This is the Myth of the Moderate. There is no such thing a "moderate" or a "centrist" in the modern day. Ask them about issues and they're just conservatives who are embarrassed about it.

Hi, I consider myself a moderate. Feel free to ask me any questions. Happy to knock your silly strawman down. :)

Federal troops assassinating kneeling protesters is still not within the Overton window though.

I don't think the social media landscape is inherently bad, but the ways in which it evolved. And I think the shift in social media towards consuming content instead of connecting with others is a direct reflection of the era we live in; one of abundant information.

Social media will stop becoming relevant when we stop treating each person as a mini corporation that needs to provide value, trying to optimize every aspect of your life in a life-long marketing campaign.

You may be onto something. It is a little bit like google when it first started showing ads. Initially, the ads were clearly marked and were promised to be relevant to the user, but that line has been moved slowly in a way to extract more and more value from the user.. while removing value that user already had.

I know social media had some real use cases. CL and FB marketplace are probably one good example of that. But the rest of it.. best I can say, my overall happiness jumped up after first month of going on a media diet.

I feel like this misses what's actually going on. The "small, sharp, ideologically extreme" discussions aren't going away, they're just happening elsewhere. From the abstract, the reason for the decline is: "the youngest and oldest Americans increasingly abstaining from social media". The young people are talking in private Discord groups, and the old people are talking in private text groups. These private groups don't show up in social media studies. The paper even states this directly: "everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps".

YC does have brakes ... Accounts are rate limited for engaging in conversations that are determined to be beneath the dignity of the platform. It's not clear if the rate limiting is biased against certain perspectives.

FB and Twitter seem to drive heavy political ideological content at the slightest hint of engagement.

I think a problem with loud poles and a quiet middle is the political class takes its queue from the internet discourse. The algorithms drive content, but in a reverse fashion they also poll the electorate, providing signal the political scientists use to calibrate messaging.

> It's not clear if the rate limiting is biased against certain perspectives.

This is unavoidable. "The dignity of the platform" is a euphemism for moral cowardice masquerading as reason and civility.

Someone like Charlie Kirk - a bigoted troll who used "debate" as a weapon - would have fitted right in here, because he couched his bigotry in a civil manner.

MLK is relevant here, in his description of "moderates":

> more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

Some other references:

"Stop glorifying ‘centrism’. It is an insidious bias favoring an unjust status quo": https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/28/centri...

"Can the Center Hold Any Meaning?": https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/political-centr...

"A Critique of Pure Tolerance": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Critique_of_Pure_Tolerance

Is that the current approach that is being sold?

Status quo and its increasingly damaged institutions are some of the few things that keep events from spiraling out of control.

And I would personally abstain from spitting on Kirk's grave. At the rate things are going, it is hardly a given a newcomer will be willing to talk at all. [edit: overtly antagonizing section removed]

> a bigoted troll who used "debate" as a weapon

Reminds me of the trial of Socrates...

I think a lot of what's happening is that individuals and their in-groups are replacing social media for comms with chat apps, leaving much of the remaining social media use being either reposting crap or for opinion blasts... or in the worst case, thoughtlessly reposting other people's [extreme] opinion blasts.

One thing is true: actual, active socializing is happening in chat apps (and Discord), not FB, X, or IG.

Amusingly I've solved this problem of polarized partisans personally. I have an extraordinarily large blocklist of users (including an auto-hide on the top 1000 commenters by word-count). Annoyingly this has created a new problem: reading HN is a lot more enjoyable so I use it more.

That's the result of excess censorship and PRs on those platform, you can play with people more or less easily but you can't re-program them at such speed. They understand and start rejecting the narrative.

Vocal minorities vary but tend just to excite the others, not to affirm any point.

> Still, we have already lost so much of the original internet.

Hyper-monetization killed it all

There is some slight irony talking about a vocal minority in a top comment, heh.

What do you mean exactly by lost so much of the original internet?

To use internet lingo, no normies.

But to be more broad I'll present you the romantic version which is at least partly true. I miss that.

It used to feel like the internet was a place you went to explore and learn. It was harder to use and navigate, so most ordinary people did not spend much time there. Back then, a lot of people believed it would make the world better because everyone could access information and educate themselves.

That optimism did not survive contact with reality. Today you can carry essentially all human knowledge in your pocket, yet much of the internet is funneled through a handful of corporations whose business model is advertising and attention. Instead of helping people discover things, the dominant platforms optimize for keeping you scrolling with outrage, dopamine hits, and low value content. Worst thing is of course politics which moved in here.

The joy of exploring is done, but honestly I think that it atleast partly that the og users got older. Hackernews somehow reminding me the "old Internet", somehow alike people with desire to explore and have honest discussion on genuinely interesting topic.

Bring back webrings!

What makes you think that great stuff still doesn't exist, but you're the one stuck in those 5 corporations bubble that makes it impossible for you to find it?

There's still great stuff out there, it's still as hard to find and navigate as it has always been. It's still as shady and as illegal (if you care about copyright) as it has always been. Most people still don't bother to do it, you just became a part of that category.

Here, let me try snapping you out of that bubble a little bit and make you one of the today's lucky ten thousand: find a category that interests you on fmhy(.)net (SFW, I promise), see how long it takes you to spot something you had no idea existed outside your bubble.

It's worth questioning how much of the polarized rhetoric out there is rooted in reality, and how much of it is just social media selecting and promoting extreme views. The answer seems to be that it really depends on where you are.

As a Canadian, I feel that people on opposite ends of the spectrum, although they might literally call for the deaths of those on the other end, have a huge amount in common with each other. Canada has problems, but its still a pretty great country. If people would step outside of the hyper-partisan identities they've been constructing for themselves online and try to see the concerns of the other side, they'd probably find they're not as horrible or misguided as they might think while reading facebook or reddit. If the reasonable centre that dominates public policy can continue to ween itself off of American social media, there's hope for a strong, unified country that's capable of having adult political discourse between people who disagree on finer points. We clearly have some challenges to face (e.g. separatism) in getting there though.

If you're in the U.S. though, things appear very different. While both political parties seem to have been co-opted by billionaire interests, one party has fallen into what can be described as, if we're being charitable, a cult of personality. Unfortunately, that personality has been doing things that are impossible to dismiss as the online hysteria of the other side. Threatening allies with military invasion. High seas piracy. Kidnapping of a foreign leader (admittedly a not very nice one) from his nation. Betraying allies to cozy up to dictators like Putin. Torching global markets with constantly changing tariffs. The list goes on. Then there's what's going on within U.S. borders. If you're in the U.S., the polarization isn't just online. It's something very real. I feel that somebody opposing what ICE is doing in Minnesota and a die-hard Trump supporter really don't have a lot in common and I don't think removing them from online social media will result in civil discourse between the two. There are very real differences there that are coming to a head.

> Part of me is happy about it. The sooner we get out of the social media landscape, the better the society as a whole will be.. in my opinion anyway. Still, we have already lost so much of the original internet. That loss makes me sad.

While I share the hope, it's probably not going to happen: most folks have moved from FB to use AI chats. Now it's the tool to manipulate opinions and habits. And it's working very well and nuanced. With AI, the society will be more divided, more polarised, and less happy than before.

And there's no way back already! Even if the web search works well one day, the folks desire (and habit!) to outsource thinking is too strong, especially among younger.

> the folks desire (and habit!) to outsource thinking is too strong, especially among younger.

The 'younger' only because they're forming habits in the time of AI. Most all humans tend towards minimising cognitive load; the making hard decisions and consideration of complex topics and situations. It's all about the tools that were available to you at the time you started to need those tools. The core is the same. Low-level, essentially sub-conscious, human behaviour change doesn't happen on a noticeable time frame^.

^ my opinion, not based on research. ie. feel free to critique.

What has changed is the awareness of the hacks that work on the human lizard brain, and therefore pandering to all that makes us weak and powerless in exchange for money and convenience. That's the part that makes it feel, for me, more likely that there's no way back. Those hacks will only get more refined and more streamlined into exploitation.

> With AI, the society will be more divided, more polarised, and less happy than before.

While I agree for less happy, I am not seeing AI chatbot been more divisive and polirised than social media in general. Am I missing something?

A personal information bubble for anyone. All deviations from reality are normalised with "hallucinations is OK for AI".

It's devisive as much as it can be.

As opposed to an information bubble with a small group of humans? It has less personalized hallucinations but more extreme and negative ones, which I think is worse. Ideally people would look at reliable sources and use critical thinking for information, but ChatGPT seems like a better conversation partner than the average Redditor of today (who's probably also a bot...but one trained on drama and negativity).

I mean it’s really not that hard to do a little research to find out that “most” people aren’t leaving Meta properties for ChatgpT

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